Microsoft has published what is a typically-simple, top-layer look at what the authors position as important information for parents to help them protect their kids online... But, while it's certainly a start, it won't get parents far enough.

If parents want to have a better understanding of what kids do online that can get them in trouble, there are other better, more complete resources out there for both kids and parents. Remember that learning together will prevent many problems, and creates a communication "common ground" for families in an area where kids often have the knowledge advantage.

But - if you're completely lost when you see words like "133t5p33k" or "!337$p34k," this short article at microsoft.com is geared toward you.

An announcement by Bill Gates at the RSA conference: Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released for testing this summer, says Microsoft. It will include anti-spyware functionality, and will not wait for the next version of Windows.

• Info on the IE Blog
• Microsoft press release
• Reversal: Next IE update divorced from Windows (news.com)
• Microsoft to Release New Internet Browser (Yahoo! News)

(from some random web forum, via Tim)

Where would I be without FeedDemon? Between it and Outlook, most of my "content" is organized, filed and (quite intentionally) segregated into workable chunks-o-stuff.

And now FeedDemon version 1.5 is out! From the web site:

This new version offers a ton of new features, but here are the highlights:

• Powerful podcasting tools to automatically download audio files and copy them to your iPod or other media player (that's right - FeedDemon supports media players other than the iPod!)
• Integration with Bloglines and NewsGator Online Services
• Flickr and del.icio.us search channels
• Per-channel newspaper styles
• Improved popup-blocking under XP SP2
• Support for favicons throughout the user interface
• Numerous performance improvements

See the announcement on Nick Bradbury's weblog - He's the quite excellent author of FeedDemon.

If you ever wondered how to spell out the American Idol theme music, well... there ya go.

Now, aren't you glad you read this blog?

In the wow-that's-random category (yeah pun intended), Jim Wright took his new iPod shuffle, as well as three more his friends had, and made a USB RAID array with them on his Mac.

Now that's geeking out. Not sure how useful it is, but it's cool.

[via Doc Searls]

Ummm - WOW...

Google does it again, and takes online mapping and driving directions to the next level. You have to try this - if nothing else it just looks cool. On top of that, it works very well. Animated maps and excellent, clean detail are real eye-openers. Google has a tour to get you acquainted here.

"Maps are great for getting around, but online maps could be a lot better. So Google decided to make dynamic, interactive maps that are draggable — no clicking and waiting for graphics to reload each time you want to view the adjacent parts of a map. Want to be able to type in the name of a region or neighborhood and see any part of it as easily as with a regular street map? Now you can with Google Maps."

Enter an address, hit enter, and voila:

Need directions to a location? Click the live links in the map, and enter a starting address:

Driving directions are fast and in my test (home to office), quite accurate:

Click on mapped items to automatically reorient the map image (animated) and zoom in on the mapped item:

The slider for zoom detail is very nice - much better than others out there - and there are no browser refreshes happening here. No time to look into exactly how this works right now, but it definitely does.

Check it out.

Did you know that only 11% of identity theft takes place online? You're much more likely to have your identity stolen or discovered on paper, and chances are the bad guy (or gal) will be someone you know...

"The 2005 Identity Fraud Survey Report shows that despite growing fears about identity theft and online fraud, of the victims that know the identity and method used by the criminal, these crimes are more frequently committed offline than online. Internet-related fraud problems are actually less severe, less costly and not as widespread as previously thought.

"Further, the study concludes that those who access accounts online can provide earlier detection of crime than those who rely only upon mailed monthly paper statements."

Those of us who work in the field have known this for some time. And those of us who do our banking and other important transactions online also know we'll notice if something gets out of the ordinary, and we won't have to wait for a paper statement or a bounced check to tip us off.

How safe are you? Take the quiz. If there's anything you should be aware of in this day and age, it's how to protect your personal information.

Here's my results:

Your Score is 10
Please note that a perfect score is 0 and the worst possible score is 100; a typical score is 38.

How did you score?

It's a bit crazy in my world right now, between work and recovery from surgery. I'll never get around to blogging my own thoughts about all these cool things that caught my eye, so here you go - a bunch of random, cool links gathered from other blogs since the first of the year. See something you like? Then you go blog about it and let me know.

1. How I Made Four Minutes About Podcasting (from: Lisa Williams)
2. Super-size the boss
3. Need a Job ? (from: Mark Cuban)
4. Lovin' it a little too much
5. PC Based Mobile Registry Editor
6. Firefox Pomposity
7. Asteroid Named After Douglas Adams
8. BitTorrent Podcasting How-To Video
9. Prepping for Windows Server 2003 SP1....
10. BizTalk Server virtual labs available online
11. MCE in the car
12. oregon blogging map
13. PhoneThemes.com - This is gonna be huge
14. Metroblogging Bangkok: Phuket Disaster Relief: Day 2
15. The Motorola MPx goes on sale in Brunei
16. Niveus Pocket Remote - Wi-Fi Pocket PC MCE 2005 Controller Application
17. Robotics Alive Series: Monkey Head!
18. View your desktop as a list
19. New Media Center Universal Remotes at CES
20. Talk to your PocketPC Phone
21. More security audio resources
22. Wowee Robosapien V2 and Robosapien Dinosaur
23. What IS a security vulnerability, anyway?
24. Tinstall sounds cool
25. Vonage F-1000 Wi-Fi Handset
26. Media Center 2005 Wiki
27. Visual Studio 2005 CTP - December 2004 - DVD (English)

F-Secure has published a RSS feed where you can get listings of all newly-discovered viruses (see HTML list here). People responsible for knowing what's new and changing will likely want to subscribe. This is one great way to get an ongoing education, not to mention a useful reference for daily AV routines:

"We've received some questions on whether it would be possible to receive the list of our new virus descriptions as an RSS feed.

"Well, turns out we've had this available for quite some time already, but I guess we've never really officially announced it.

"So: our new virus descriptions are available as an RSS feed here: "

Word is out that Half-Life 2, that cool sequel to the biggest PC game things ever, will be released on a new arcade game platform soon in Japan, to be followed by a release worldwide.

From MegaGames via Tim:

Half-Life 2 is about to make the move to arcades all over Japan by the summer of 2005, with the rest of the world expected to join-in soon after. According to Taito, its Type-X arcade board will be able to support the game while it will also offer a variety of features not seen before in arcade games.

The Type-X board is based on a PC setup, running a version of Windows, so H-L 2 will not have to travel far to get to it, especially since the arcade version will be very similar to the PC version being released in a couple of weeks time. One of the selling points of the arcade Half-Life 2 will be the introduction of the online multiplayer modes.
According to Taito, gamers will be able to connect to and challenge other gamers playing the same game across Japan. Two online modes will be available, the confrontational Battle mode and the co=operative Mission mode. Online play will be made possible due to Taito's Net Entry System (NETSYS)which will also feature in arcade games such as Battle Gear 3 and Zoid Infinity. One of the advantages of NETSYS is its ability to store data at server level, enabling gamers to recall their profile from any connected arcade machine.

Taito has big plans for the arcade version of H-L 2, plans which include online play, a game booth offering 5.1 sound and its introduction to arcades all over the world. Details of the control set-up or of the exact dates the machines will appear in Japan and all over the world, have not yet been released.

A year ago, I posted a blog entry about a family that had just named their child "John Blake Kusak 2.0."

Now, one year later, weird headlines tells the tale of another family and their just-turned-one-year-old son, "Jake Matthew Thompson Two Point Zero." Apparently some companies are having a hard time getting the kid's name right. Go figure.

Argh. Something scary when parents call their kids "upgrades."

Someone check in with these kids when they turn 18, and see how well/badly things turned out.

I recently started using passphrases instead of passwords for my various computer accounts. So far I have found only one place where it just doesn't work.

I'm calling it a success so far.

Using something akin to natural English - complete with with spaces, punctuation and natural capitalization - makes passphrases very easy to remember and (despite their longer length) often easier to type than convoluted "strong" passwords.

But something funny happened to me on the way to my computer the other day, when I was playing with test passphrases in preparation for making the Big Change. I've discovered that passphrases may tell more about the person using them than one might realize.

Let's say, for example, I choose a passphrase (and this is very hypothetical) like:

How the heck did you do that Dude?

It's easy to type because it's just a sentence, easy to remember because it's conversational, secure because it's long and complex. Obviously, moving away from a simple plain-language phrase like the example above can be strengthened further by throwing in non-natural characters, phrase structure, etc., just like with passwords.

But I digress... In my hypothetical example passphrase above, what do you imagine would cause me to keep typing the passphrase incorrectly?

As it turns out, there's a tendency to think not about the exact wording, but instead about what the phrase communicates. So, in the above example there are two words I might keep screwing up.

The first problematic word is "that." The tendency here is to type "this" instead of "that," as in "How the heck did you do this Dude?" or "This is a really cool thing you're doing." Natural human speech tendency.

The second problematic word is a little more colorful (and Freudian) in its psychological adaptation. Take the word "heck" and figure out how many similar words a person might use. Depending on mood (which seems to be a real factor affecting outcome in my case, heheh), the person typing the passphrase might type "hell" in place of "heck." It has the same two first letters, and so it's a natural tendency. But take the word "heck," apply some life or personal stress, and then take a look at the last two letters of the word, and I'll leave it up to you to come up with another four-word replacement that shares those last two characters, and also fits into the passphrase (conversationally and in a rude kind of way).

You get the idea. Anyhow, I only locked myself out of that test account once.

Freud would probably be proud. But hey, that figures - he was a drug addict and a freak.

Because great things come from the people, Rory has started a new project and invited the whole world in. It's called NeoWikiDiki... Anyone can participate. That means you.

"This is a wiki based dictionary that sucks. It sucks because none of us know what in the hell we're doing or talking about, but we're all contributing to this big thing at the same time.

"Some of us will use spell checkers. Others won't.

"Some of us will ensure correct definitions based on others stolen from existing and reputable references. Others won't.

"Some of us will only edit definitions in the nude. Others won't.

"Others will come here to actually look words up.

"These people... These people, we will call 'victims.'"

A few fixes and some general cleanup went into a beta code refresh for people already addicted to the MSN Toolbar Suite. Download available.

Below is from BetaNews:
http://www.betanews.com/article/MSN_Updates_Desktop_Search_Beta/1107283659

MSN Updates Desktop Search Beta
By Nate Mook, BetaNews
February 1, 2005, 1:47 PM

While the new MSN Search was the center of attention Tuesday, Microsoft developers have silently refreshed the MSN Toolbar Suite, which includes the company's Desktop Search Beta. The updated release offers a number of minor fixes and performance improvements, including better indexing of e-mail attachments.

In the initial beta, a number of MSN Desktop Search users received antivirus warnings each time an e-mail attachment was cataloged, due to the software creating a temporary file. Developers note, however, that "no virus would occur as a result of this because the file wasn't opened, but it was annoying to get the pop-ups."

To correct this behavior, developers have modified the IFilter, which are DLLs used by MSN Desktop Search to index a particular file type.

The new release also enables the indexing of Outlook items, even if Microsoft's e-mail client is not set as the default. Other improvements including the clearing of Deskbar text after a search, as well as bug fixes that improve the "overall stability and robustness" of MSN Desktop Search.

"We are not planning to Autoupdate existing users, but if you are seeing any of the problems above or want to be running the latest and greatest bits download it today! You don't have to uninstall your existing version," wrote MSN program managers Paul Steckler and Bubba Murarka in a Web log posting.

MSN Toolbar Suite Beta version 2.0.1.1203 is available for download via FileForum.